Matt Beard: We Have To Be More Ruthless

Liverpool Women were flying high last week after a well-deserved victory against Reading, so it’s extremely frustrating to see them lose to Leicester City this weekend, especially after missing some crucial chances. For boss, Matt Beard, days like this where the team just cannot team to score are particularly frustrating.

“We’re gutted because we’ve done so much to let alone get something out of the game, but to win it,” Beard told the club’s website after the match ended. “But if you don’t take your chances... we’ve had three clear-cut chances today and we haven’t taken them. The set-plays that we’ve had, we work on that a lot and it’s frustrating that we’ve not got anything from it today.”

“We were frustrated with our first-half display because we weren’t patient enough with the build. Everyone was coming central, we couldn’t play around. If you look at Leicester they concede a lot of goals from crosses and that’s why we went for wing-backs today, to push the wide centre-backs on and push the wing-backs high to try to get crosses into the box. But the formation change [in the second half] helped I thought. Mel [Lawley], I thought first half was out of the game, second half she was fantastic.”

“We wanted to go into an international break with a win and the way the game was panning out we would have taken a draw at the end, and I felt we would definitely have been worthy of that. But it’s part and parcel of the game, sometimes you have days where for whatever reason it just doesn’t go in and even Willie [Kirk, Leicester’s manager] said to me after the game: ‘You have no luck.’ But it’s one of those things, there are lots of positives we can take from the chances we created [and] some of the play, especially in the second half, but we’ve got to be more clinical and more ruthless in the final third.”